Toward Culturally Sustaining Approaches to Science Classroom Assessment

• In Event: Noticing and Responding to Student Thinking for Equity

Abstract

Purpose
The new vision for science education reform is unequivocal in its call for more equitable science learning experiences for all learners, particularly those historically held at the margins in school (NRC, 2012). Classrooms should be designed so learners engage in science and engineering practices and apply crosscutting concepts to learn disciplinary core ideas, all to figure out real-world phenomena that relate to their ideas and experiences (NASEM, 2018; 2022). This approach builds on approaches to responsive teaching, in which students’ ideas are seen as productive towards developing disciplinary understanding and informing next instructional steps (Authors, 2016).
Since the release of the NGSS (NRC, 2013), high quality curricular materials have been developed that align with such responsive practices. Assessment, however, as part of a system that includes curriculum and instruction, has much room to improve toward supporting rather than hindering these advances (Shepard et al., 2018).
In this paper, we describe our approach to building assessments based upon students’ interests and identities, including the creation of a tool to inform science teacher adaptation of existing tasks to better respond to and sustain students’ lives outside of the classroom.


Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
Assessment is situated not just in science classrooms but within the larger ecologies intersecting with students’ lives. We draw on culturally responsive (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and culturally sustaining approaches (Alim & Paris, 2017; Paris, 2012), which emphasize that responding to and sustaining the knowledge and practices of youth are essential goals for educational reforms. These perspectives inform how we seek to reform science classroom assessment by looking to how “the sociocultural identities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students [can be] deliberately integrated… in every planning/development phase of the assessment” (Randall et al., 2021, p. 596).
However, current assessment practice can privilege canonical concepts and explanations at the expense of learners’ ideas and experiences (Bang et al., 2013; Penuel & Shepard, 2016; Randall et al., 2021). This is in part because these assessments are largely mismatched with the vision of the Framework and, as a result, limit what is assessed (e.g. Au, 2007; Braaten et al., 2017).


Mode of inquiry and materials
We describe development of a heuristic to guide assessment design, use, and implementation that builds on the work of Randall and colleagues (Randall, 2021; Randall et al., 2021). The heuristic (Table 1) is intended to support educators, developers, and science education leaders to integrate more culturally sustaining approaches to assessment. It invites those in these roles to reflect on their positionality, existing assessment practices, the purposes of assessment, and how students can play a more central role in determining how they experience assessment.


Warrants for arguments and significance
In the full paper, we present arguments for each category in the heuristic as well as ways that the heuristic informed the design of professional learning experiences in our ongoing Research-Practice Partnership with a large urban school district. The paper is of critical significance as it interrogates assumptions about the status quo in science classroom assessment.

Authors

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Clarissa de Oliveira Deverel-Rico, BSCS Science Learning

• Douglas Adam Watkins, Denver Public Schools